This invention relates to a procedure and furnace apt to incinerate waste materials, for example, artificial plastic material, without giving rise to the creation of smoke.
Although the procedure and special furnace may have unlimited applications insofar as the materials to be incinerated are concerned, they are particularly advantageous and suited to destroy, by incineration, photographic and cinematographic film residuates resulting from the electrochemical treatments performed on same, in order to recover the metals (mainly precious metals) used for the sensitive emulsions previously deposited on said films.
The main advantages that can be obtained by implementation of the procedure and furnace according to the invention as compared to other means for the destruction of waste material already known in the art, consist in a greater simplicity, lower operating costs, and, while consenting the desired results, do not require burners and purifiers for the smoke produced, unlike the known equipment.
The procedure forming the object of this invention consists essentially in producing the carbonization, distillation and combustion of a mass of waste material to be destroyed by the effect of the heat transferred to said mass by a steel preheated red hot plate which is caused to exert a downward pressure on the top surface of the waste mass itself; the heat which develops by the effect of combustion of the volatile substances as a result of the above distillation is utilized to maintain said large plate in the red hot condition until the material to be destroyed is totally exhausted.
The furnace required to implement the above described procedure is formed essentially by a truncated cylinder shaped hollow body preferably made of steel material, the bottom part of which is provided with a variable volume chamber which forms the hearth, whilst a steel plate, is placed over head, said plate being conveniently heated red hot and guided so as to move in a top to bottom direction; said plate is surmounted, at a given distance, by a second circular crown shaped plate; both plates are secured to each other and sustained by a tubular element, the end part of which terminates with at least one nozzle in the interspace between said plates, to inject air under pressure into said interspace.
The furnace required to implement the procedure for incineration of waste materials without producing smoke and which forms the object of this invention, will now be described in greater detail for a better understanding, in conjunction with the annexed drawing which illustrates, only by way of example, one preferred form of embodiment of the invention.